Learning about grey literature by interviewing subject librarians: A study at the University of Rochester

During the 2003-2004 academic year, library staff at the University of Rochester studied how faculty members find, use, and produce grey literature to do their scholarly work. We formed a research team that included an anthropologist, librarians, a graphic designer, computer scientist, programmer, and cataloger, and we learned the methods of work-practice study. With funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), we then interviewed twenty-five faculty members in art and art history, economics, modern languages, linguistics, physics, and political science with the hope that what we learned would be useful in designing additions or modifications to our institutional repository.